Editing Synthetism (section)

==History==
Paul Gauguin, Émile Bernard, Louis Anquetin, and others pioneered the style during the late 1880s and early 1890s.

Synthetist artists aimed to ''synthesize'' three features: 
*The outward appearance of natural forms.
*The artist's feelings about their subject.
*The purity of the aesthetic considerations of line, colour and form.

In 1890, [[Maurice Denis]] summarized the goals for synthetism as,
:''It is well to remember that a picture before being a battle horse, a nude woman, or some anecdote, is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order.''

The term was first used in 1877 to distinguish between scientific and naturalistic [[Impressionism]], and in 1889 when Gauguin and [[Emile Schuffenecker]] organized an ''[[The Volpini Exhibition, 1889|Exposition de peintures du groupe impressioniste et synthétiste]]'' in the Café Volpini at the [[Exposition Universelle (1889)|Exposition Universelle]] in Paris. The confusing title has been mistakenly associated with [[Impressionism]]. Synthetism emphasized two-dimensional flat patterns, thus differing from Impressionist art and theory.